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Alien Nation, Part Two
Where is our humanity?
by DK Holland

BROADCASTING INJUSTICEThe Oscar-nominated, controversial film Django Unchained,
directed by white director Quentin Tarantino, exploits the exploitation
of blacks by depicting a gruesome caricature of the slave Django and,
in general, of slavery in 1858, seven years before all slaves were freed
by law. In Tarantino’s film live slaves are torn limb from limb by
snarling dogs as white men look on. The strongest of male slaves are
forced to fight to the death for the sheer amusement of the plantation
owners. Attractive slave women become sex slaves. Director Spike Lee, a
descendant of slaves, called the treatment of African Americans in the
South “a holocaust” and refused to see Tarantino’s film because he
anticipated it demeaned his ancestors. But audiences—white and black
alike—cheer (spoiler alert) as the super strong and now ultra-savvy
Django cleverly wipes out all the whites (and the heartless “Uncle Tom”)
on the plantation and burns it to the ground before riding off into the
sunset with his gorgeous, gun-totting African American bride Brunhilde,
whom he has just liberated. Some thought this film would have been more
aptly titled, The Thirteenth Amendment.

SLAVERY RIGHT IN YOUR BACKYARDEven
though slavery is officially outlawed by all countries, it’s estimated
that between 12 and 27 million people of many cultures are held against
their will today (particularly in Asia, but also in the United States)
and forced to perform demeaning acts. Much of slavery still revolves
around the economics of cheap, unskilled labor.

A sense of
hopelessness, of being trapped in a loveless relationship, no-growth
job, deprived of access to a path up and out of a situation, unable to
move on with your life—these are forms of slavery. If you don’t see a
choice, you have no options; if you have no options, you are enslaved.
To this we can all relate.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, passed
nearly half a century ago, was extended to protect racial, ethnic and
religious minorities as well as women (who, of course, make up half the
world’s human population) against public discrimination. But even after
this Federal act was passed into law, some Southern states still refused
to inte-grate schools and some states forbade blacks and whites to wed.
In 1964, Virginian Judge Leon Bazile rationalized that “Almighty God
created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and He placed
them on separate continents...The fact that He separated the races shows
that He did not intend for the races to mix.”

MIXING IT UPWhile
exaggerated and demeaning tales may perpetuate stereotypes, the tables
are often turned to create awareness; fighting fire with fire. In fact,
photography and other media (television, film, newspapers, magazines)
have helped push through some hard-won laws by using emotionally-charged
imagery, artfully manipulated to spur emotions. The recent HBO
documentary The Loving Story tells of the lives of Mildred Jeter,
a gentle beauty, part African/Native American, and blonde-haired,
muscular Richard Loving. In another era, in another place, they could
have been homecoming king and queen. But this was 1959, in the state of
Virginia, so instead they were sentenced to prison for cohabitation. The
film talks about how the married couple, after getting suspended
sentences, fled north so they could start a family. But Mildred wanted
badly to go home and all Richard wanted was her happiness. So she wrote
to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy who referred her to the ACLU. The
Supreme Court ultimately heard the case and in 1967 reaffirmed the
inherent promise made to all citizens in the Constitution of the United
States, that all people should be afforded the freedom to pursue
happiness. We empathize with the Lovings’ plight and, in doing so, we
care about their rights knowing they are our rights too. Without LIFE
magazine photographer Grey Villet’s breathtaking still photography of
the Lovings and Nancy Buirski and Elisabeth Haviland James’s
heartrending HBO documentary, the lessons of Loving v. Virginia may have remained buried in history.

FOR THE LOVE OF ITDesigner Lisa Babb, a person of color,
moved South for love, to start a family in a small rural Georgia town
right outside Atlanta. “Moving from Brooklyn to segregated Georgia was
staggering. The looks I would get!” She became a professor of design at
Savannah College of Art and Design. “I told my husband we had to move
into Atlanta, which is better, but still, every time I go to a client
meeting I wait for the ‘surprised look.’ Someone told me ‘You can always
tell when a black person designed something.’ I was totally shocked!
This is the perception. I tell all my students ‘There are two different
kinds of design: good design and bad design. That’s it.’

“I have
to work harder than white people. My father taught me that.” Babb feels
it’s important that her students see her as a qualified designer, to
help to destroy the stereotype. “When I teach, I affirm to my students,
‘This is why I’m at the helm of this ship.’”

Babb’s maternal
great grandparents were sharecroppers who worked the fields of South
Carolina. Her paternal grandfather stowed away on a ship at the age of
nine to work on the building of the Panama Canal. He helped the canal
workers unionize for better working conditions. Her parents had dignity
and discipline. They wanted a better life for their children. Babb
recalls, “It was 1986, I was at Notre Dame, in pre-med, when a teacher
asked me, ‘Have you ever heard of graphic design? You have a gift.’ I
realized this was my passion. I told my parents I was going to study
design. My father said, ‘You can’t do that. You should be a doctor.’ He
saw design as a hobby, not a career.”

This was a pivotal moment
for Babb who toughed it out to break into design, a profession in which
people of color have always been very poorly represented. She says,
“I’ve never had the luxury of being under-qualified. After I graduated
from college I worked for Arnold Saks in New York where we did annual
reports. It started out as a nothing job. I organized the paper
swatchbooks. I was the only African American there except for a guy who
was a kind of boy Friday. Arnold figured out I had nothing to do and
plugged me into the senior-level designers, who taught me production.
They apprenticed me.”

DK HollandDK Holland writes about design and teaches in two MFA design programs in New York, one at SVA and one at Pratt. She is an advisor to Project M and Design Ignites Change. Holland has been the editor of Design Issues since she started it in 1990. She is the author/producer of many books on design as well as Branding for Nonprofits. She is the producer of CitizenME, which creates transmedia tools that engage students in understanding how to become proactive citizens. Holland lives and works in her tiny nineteenth-century restored Italianate house and garden in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.